About

I wanted to be a musician since I was a teenager. The only problem was that I wasn't very good at it, as some of you who have heard my early efforts can attest. But in the words of the great Adam Ant, "ridicule is nothing to be scared of" (or if we prefer Bono, "the right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear"). Because even great art is ridiculous. Just listen to Thom Yorke's shrieking, Bob Dylan's nasally, offkey singing or Prince's falsetto. Which inspires anyone who wants to express their truth and emotion via music to be ridiculous. 

So I kept at it over the years, writing countless songs (actually, over 200), performing in a school band, playing a few gigs at small clubs in Manhattan,  taking voice and guitar lessons, playing for friends, even getting a callback for the Broadway production of Bombay Dreams.  My musicianship, songwriting and production skills gradually improved. Now I'm sharing the best of my work on this platform as my next stage of being ridiculous. 

I also have written fiction over the years, and spent years re-working Ravi's Guide to Being a Cool Indian. I read a quote in the NY Times Magazine (profiling Akhil Sharma on July 12, 2022) that says, "A novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it." The difficulty is determining whether your work has so much wrong with it that no one will finish reading it. Workshops help, but after a certain point, it's hard to tell whether you've met the threshold, especially with feedback along the lines of "I love the premise, your characters are well drawn, the dialogue and narrative tension are fantastic, but the pacing was a little off." So, you're saying my book is just like half the prize-winning novels I've read?  

Again from the NY Times: "there is always something problematic about [a novel] that the novelist must push through if he or she is going to achieve not perfection but an uneasy truce with formal forces that cannot be vanquished. And so novelists revise novels, endlessly, necessarily, on the way to completing them, which is to say by accepting their problems and moving on. " I've formed my truce and am ready to move on. I have no delusions that my novel is prize-worthy, but I think some of you will find it an entertaining, smartly-observed and ultimately heart-warming read.